Cheerful Money

Me, My Family, and the Last Days of Wasp Splendor

By Tad Friend

(Little, Brown; 353 pages; $24.99)

Money or not, everybody grows up. Some of us do it successfully, some not. But no matter our religion, our ethnicity, our culture, at some point we must reckon with the truth that our families are our fate - not all of it, thank heaven, but enough so that it behooves us to look back on those who made us, painful though that might be. Tad Friend looked back and he has written a book for all of us.

"Cheerful Money" is full to bursting with Family. The family tree (which covers two pages), Friend tells us is "somewhat simplified." I mention this tree because even simplified it threatens our enjoyment of what turns out to be a splendid book. So reader, a caveat though not a deterrent: Everybody on this tree is named for somebody else on it, then given nicknames, I suppose to distinguish them from earlier generations although sometimes the nicknames are the same, too: "Timmie," "Addie," "Paddy." Not only do people in the family get renamed, often they pick up new ones: "Theodore," Tad's father, is also "Day" and "Dorie." Add to that "Goggy," "Gah," and "Inky," and anyone might become confused, even a bit irritated. Class envy? A tad (cough), maybe, but short-lived.

Be reassured: Tad Friend does fall far enough from the tree to give us a delightfully rendered account of not only his self-discovery but an examination of "The Last Days of Wasp Splendor." It is gorgeously written: About an Australian he meets during his travels, "He had the bleared eyes of the blackout drunk ... His stitch-welted surgical scars looked like a shark's bite." Later, describing a family friend enjoying a swim, "his stomach shining whitely like a tiny arctic kingdom." Oh, reader, you are in for a treat.

Friend is born into privilege: summer houses, maids, private schools, ditzy relatives, "dumbwaiters and foot bells under the dining-room rug," all great fun to read about. He goes to the right school (Harvard), is selected by the right society (Signet), writes for the right magazines (Spy, the New Yorker). But privilege of the sort he grew up with is on its way out, and by the end of "Cheerful Money," Friend and his wife, Amanda Hesser, are living on the money they make, not on what they have inherited. Are we just a tiny bit glad? Do we say Good, now you'll find out how the other half, no wait, three-fourths, live? No, because Friend, journalist that he is, provides a convincing historical context that argues that all of us, not just Wasps, would be caught up in changes begun in the '60s never to be reversed. As he writes: "Nineteen sixty-five marked the beginning of the social upheaval that would sweep away so many certainties and batter so many Wasp redoubts. ... The year that Buck Henry wrote the screenplay for The Graduate, the movie that ... foresaw how the emerging generation gap would leave everyone stranded."

Being stranded would not be clear to Friend for some time. (He was 3 in 1965.) His mother seemed not to notice, busy as she was with excoriating magnolia carpets and lamenting her unfettered past now that three children were upon her. Her cheerfulness, barbed and hostile, in the face of absolutely everything surely stoked what Friend calls "the banked ferocity between us." His father, on the other hand, knew where the money was and where it was going - away - and chose not to share the information. Wasps, in case you didn't know, are not great at sharing. And so, "Groomed as an insider, I was excluded from originality and the deepest pleasures and discoveries - that I would never be able to rip off my armor and free any underlying talents and passions."

The long, hard work of psychoanalysis helped to free him, so did travel, so did his talent as a writer, though obstacles loomed: A girlfriend told him he was "like a wet linen sheet that had been crumpled up and left in the freezer." Bet it took a while to get over that. But nowhere in this book does he allow self-pity or longing for times past, or accusations against self or others to creep in. His account of losing his armor is straightforward, funny and often moving.

Which brings us to Friend's father, Theodore Wood Friend III, known also as Day and Dorie, a scholar, 11th president of Swarthmore College, a loving and patient husband and distant father. A colleague wrote of him, "There is much sweetness in him, but the sap doesn't flow." Still, he is eloquent, oh so eloquent, and it is here that I find myself truly envious. I would have given anything to have so distant a father as Day, one who would write to his mother a letter thanking her for "gifts of life - your beauty, passion, prudence, and independence. ... Any flaws in my character are my own. Thank you for my strengths."

"Cheerful Money," in a way, is Friend's own letter to his father from a son who sees his flaws as his own, his strengths issuing from his father, deepened and enriched by his own efforts. In Tad's case, the sweetness flows and we the readers are richer for it.

So - how far and how safely has Tad Friend fallen from the tree? The test lies in his children, neither one yet 5. Where will they go to school? Harvard? Yale? How about Berkeley? Just a thought.